The Tragic Muse, by Henry James

V

Lady Agnes’s idea had been that her son should go straight from the Palais de l’Industrie to the
Hôtel de Hollande, with or without his mother and his sisters as his humour should seem to recommend. Much as she
desired to see their valued Julia, and as she knew her daughters desired it, she was quite ready to put off their visit
if this sacrifice should contribute to a speedy confrontation for Nick. She was anxious he should talk with Mrs.
Dallow, and anxious he should be anxious himself; but it presently appeared that he was conscious of no pressure of
eagerness. His view was that she and the girls should go to their cousin without delay and should, if they liked, spend
the rest of the day in her society. He would go later; he would go in the evening. There were lots of things he wanted
to do meanwhile.

This question was discussed with some intensity, though not at length, while the little party stood on the edge of
the Place de la Concorde, to which they had proceeded on foot; and Lady Agnes noticed that the “lots of things” to
which he proposed to give precedence over an urgent duty, a conference with a person who held out full hands to him,
were implied somehow in the friendly glance with which he covered the great square, the opposite bank of the Seine, the
steep blue roofs of the quay, the bright immensity of Paris. What in the world could be more important than making sure
of his seat? — so quickly did the good lady’s imagination travel. And now that idea appealed to him less than a ramble
in search of old books and prints — since she was sure this was what he had in his head. Julia would be flattered
should she know it, but of course she mustn’t know it. Lady Agnes was already thinking of the least injurious account
she could give of the young man’s want of precipitation. She would have liked to represent him as tremendously
occupied, in his room at their own hotel, in getting off political letters to every one it should concern, and
particularly in drawing up his address to the electors of Harsh. Fortunately she was a woman of innumerable
discretions, and a part of the worn look that sat in her face came from her having schooled herself for years, in
commerce with her husband and her sons, not to insist unduly. She would have liked to insist, nature had formed her to
insist, and the self-control had told in more ways than one. Even now it was powerless to prevent her suggesting that
before doing anything else Nick should at least repair to the inn and see if there weren’t some telegrams.

He freely consented to do as much as this, and, having called a cab that she might go her way with the girls, kissed
her again as he had done at the exhibition. This was an attention that could never displease her, but somehow when he
kissed her she was really the more worried: she had come to recognise it as a sign that he was slipping away from her,
and she wished she might frankly take it as his clutch at her to save him. She drove off with a vague sense that at any
rate she and the girls might do something toward keeping the place warm for him. She had been a little vexed that Peter
had not administered more of a push toward the Hôtel de Hollande, clear as it had become to her now that there was a
foreignness in Peter which was not to be counted on and which made him speak of English affairs and even of English
domestic politics as local and even “funny.” They were very grandly local, and if one recalled, in public life, an
occasional droll incident wasn’t that, liberally viewed, just the warm human comfort of them? As she left the two young
men standing together in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, the grand composition of which Nick, as she looked
back, appeared to have paused to admire — as if he hadn’t seen it a thousand times! — she wished she might have thought
of Peter’s influence with her son as exerted a little more in favour of localism. She had a fear he wouldn’t abbreviate
the boy’s ill-timed flânerie. However, he had been very nice: he had invited them all to dine with him that
evening at a convenient café, promising to bring Julia and one of his colleagues. So much as this he had been willing
to do to make sure Nick and his sister should meet. His want of localism, moreover, was not so great as that if it
should turn out that there was anything beneath his manner toward Biddy —! The upshot of this reflexion might
have been represented by the circumstance of her ladyship’s remarking after a minute to her younger daughter, who sat
opposite her in the voiture de place, that it would do no harm if she should get a new hat and that the search
might be instituted that afternoon.

“A French hat, mamma?” said Grace. “Oh do wait till she gets home!”

“I think they’re really prettier here, you know,” Biddy opined; and Lady Agnes said simply: “I daresay they’re
cheaper.” What was in her mind in fact was: “I daresay Peter thinks them becoming.” It will be seen she had plenty of
inward occupation, the sum of which was not lessened by her learning when she reached the top of the Rue de la Paix
that Mrs. Dallow had gone out half an hour before and had left no message. She was more disconcerted by this incident
than she could have explained or than she thought was right, as she had taken for granted Julia would be in a manner
waiting for them. How could she be sure Nick wasn’t coming? When people were in Paris a few days they didn’t mope in
the house, but she might have waited a little longer or have left an explanation. Was she then not so much in earnest
about Nick’s standing? Didn’t she recognise the importance of being there to see him about it? Lady Agnes wondered if
her behaviour were a sign of her being already tired of the way this young gentleman treated her. Perhaps she had gone
out because an instinct told her that the great propriety of their meeting early would make no difference with him —
told her he wouldn’t after all come. His mother’s heart sank as she glanced at this possibility that their precious
friend was already tired, she having on her side an intuition that there were still harder things in store. She had
disliked having to tell Mrs. Dallow that Nick wouldn’t see her till the evening, but now she disliked still more her
not being there to hear it. She even resented a little her kinswoman’s not having reasoned that she and the girls would
come in any event, and not thought them worth staying in for. It came up indeed that she would perhaps have gone to
their hotel, which was a good way up the Rue de Rivoli, near the Palais Royal — on which the cabman was directed to
drive to that establishment.

As he jogged along she took in some degree the measure of what that might mean, Julia’s seeking a little to avoid
them. Was she growing to dislike them? Did she think they kept too sharp an eye on her, so that the idea of their
standing in a still closer relation wouldn’t be enticing? Her conduct up to this time had not worn such an appearance,
unless perhaps a little, just a very little, in the matter of her ways with poor Grace. Lady Agnes knew she wasn’t
particularly fond of poor Grace, and could even sufficiently guess the reason — the manner in which Grace betrayed most
how they wanted to make sure of her. She remembered how long the girl had stayed the last time she had been at Harsh —
going for an acceptable week and dragging out her visit to a month. She took a private heroic vow that Grace shouldn’t
go near the place again for a year; not, that is, unless Nick and Julia were married within the time. If that were to
happen she shouldn’t care. She recognised that it wasn’t absolutely everything Julia should be in love with Nick; it
was also better she should dislike his mother and sisters after a probable pursuit of him than before. Lady Agnes did
justice to the natural rule in virtue of which it usually comes to pass that a woman doesn’t get on with her husband’s
female belongings, and was even willing to be sacrificed to it in her disciplined degree. But she desired not to be
sacrificed for nothing: if she was to be objected to as a mother-inlaw she wished to be the mother-inlaw first.

At the hotel in the Rue de Rivoli she had the disappointment of finding that Mrs. Dallow had not called, and also
that no telegrams had come. She went in with the girls for half an hour and then straggled out with them again. She was
undetermined and dissatisfied and the afternoon was rather a problem; of the kind, moreover, that she disliked most and
was least accustomed to: not a choice between different things to do — her life had been full of that — but a want of
anything to do at all. Nick had said to her before they separated: “You can knock about with the girls, you know;
everything’s amusing here.” That was easily said while he sauntered and gossiped with Peter Sherringham and perhaps
went to see more pictures like those in the Salon. He was usually, on such occasions, very good-natured about spending
his time with them; but this episode had taken altogether a perverse, profane form. She had no desire whatever to knock
about and was far from finding everything in Paris amusing. She had no aptitude for aimlessness, and moreover thought
it vulgar. If she had found Julia’s card at the hotel — the sign of a hope of catching them just as they came back from
the Salon — she would have made a second attempt to see her before the evening; but now certainly they would leave her
alone. Lady Agnes wandered joylessly with the girls in the Palais Royal and the Rue de Richelieu, and emerged upon the
Boulevard, where they continued their frugal prowl, as Biddy rather irritatingly called it. They went into five shops
to buy a hat for Biddy, and her ladyship’s presumptions of cheapness were woefully belied.

“Who in the world’s your comic friend?” Peter Sherringham was meanwhile asking of his kinsman as they walked
together.

“Ah there’s something else you lost by going to Cambridge — you lost Gabriel Nash!”

“He sounds like an Elizabethan dramatist,” Sherringham said. “But I haven’t lost him, since it appears now I shan’t
be able to have you without him.”

“Oh, as for that, wait a little. I’m going to try him again, but I don’t know how he wears. What I mean is that
you’ve probably lost his freshness, which was the great thing. I rather fear he’s becoming conventional, or at any rate
serious.”

“Bless me, do you call that serious?”

“He used to be so gay. He had a real genius for playing with ideas. He was a wonderful talker.”

“It seems to me he does very well now,” said Peter Sherringham.

“Oh this is nothing. He had great flights of old, very great flights; one saw him rise and rise and turn somersaults
in the blue — one wondered how far he could go. He’s very intelligent, and I should think it might be interesting to
find out what it is that prevents the whole man from being as good as his parts. I mean in case he isn’t so good.”

“I see you more than suspect that. Mayn’t it be simply that he’s too great an ass?”

“That would be the whole — I shall see in time — but it certainly isn’t one of the parts. It may be the effect, but
it isn’t the cause, and it’s for the cause I claim an interest. Do you think him an ass for what he said about the
theatre — his pronouncing it a coarse art?”

“To differ from you about him that reason would do,” said Sherringham. “The only bad one would be one that shouldn’t
preserve our difference. You needn’t tell me you agree with him, for frankly I don’t care.”

“Then your passion still burns?” Nick Dormer asked.

“My passion —?”

“I don’t mean for any individual exponent of the equivocal art: mark the guilty conscience, mark the rising blush,
mark the confusion of mind! I mean the old sign one knew you best by; your permanent stall at the Français, your
inveterate attendance at premières, the way you ‘follow’ the young talents and the old.”

“Yes, it’s still my little hobby, my little folly if you like,” Sherringham said. “I don’t find I get tired of it.
What will you have? Strong predilections are rather a blessing; they’re simplifying. I’m fond of representation — the
representation of life: I like it better, I think, than the real thing. You like it too, you’d be ready in other
conditions to go in for it, in your way — so you’ve no right to cast the stone. You like it best done by one vehicle
and I by another; and our preference on either side has a deep root in us. There’s a fascination to me in the way the
actor does it, when his talent — ah he must have that! — has been highly trained. Ah it must be that! The
things he can do in this effort at representation, with the dramatist to back him, seem to me innumerable — he can
carry it to a point! — and I take great pleasure in observing them, in recognising and comparing them. It’s an
amusement like another — I don’t pretend to call it by any exalted name, but in this vale of friction it will serve.
One can lose one’s self in it, and it has the recommendation — in common, I suppose, with the study of the other arts —
that the further you go in it the more you find. So I go rather far, if you will. But is it the principal sign one
knows me by?” Peter abruptly asked.

“Don’t be ashamed of it,” Nick returned —“else it will be ashamed of you. I ought to discriminate. You’re
distinguished among my friends and relations by your character of rising young diplomatist; but you know I always want
the final touch to the picture, the last fruit of analysis. Therefore I make out that you’re conspicuous among rising
young diplomatists for the infatuation you describe in such pretty terms.”

“You evidently believe it will prevent my ever rising very high. But pastime for pastime is it any idler than
yours?”

“Than mine?”

“Why you’ve half-a-dozen while I only allow myself the luxury of one. For the theatre’s my sole vice, really. Is
this more wanton, say, than to devote weeks to the consideration of the particular way in which your friend Mr. Nash
may be most intensely a twaddler and a bore? That’s not my ideal of choice recreation, but I’d undertake to satisfy you
about him sooner. You’re a young statesman — who happens to be an en disponibilité for the moment — but you
spend not a little of your time in besmearing canvas with bright-coloured pigments. The idea of representation
fascinates you, but in your case it’s representation in oils — or do you practise water-colours and pastel too? You
even go much further than I, for I study my art of predilection only in the works of others. I don’t aspire to leave
works of my own. You’re a painter, possibly a great one; but I’m not an actor.” Nick Dormer declared he would certainly
become one — he was so well on the way to it; and Sherringham, without heeding this charge, went on: “Let me add that,
considering you are a painter, your portrait of the complicated Nash is lamentably dim.”

“He’s not at all complicated; he’s only too simple to give an account of. Most people have a lot of attributes and
appendages that dress them up and superscribe them, and what I like Gabriel for is that he hasn’t any at all. It makes
him, it keeps him, so refreshingly cool.”

“By Jove, you match him there! Isn’t it an appendage and an attribute to escape kicking? How does he manage that?”
Sherringham asked.

“I haven’t the least idea — I don’t know that he doesn’t rouse the kicking impulse. Besides, he can kick back and I
don’t think any one has ever seen him duck or dodge. His means, his profession, his belongings have never anything to
do with the question. He doesn’t shade off into other people; he’s as neat as an outline cut out of paper with
scissors. I like him, therefore, because in dealing with him you know what you’ve got hold of. With most men you don’t:
to pick the flower you must break off the whole dusty, thorny, worldly branch; you find you’re taking up in your grasp
all sorts of other people and things, dangling accidents and conditions. Poor Nash has none of those encumbrances: he’s
the solitary-fragrant blossom.”

“My dear fellow, you’d be better for a little of the same pruning!” Sherringham retorted; and the young men
continued their walk and their gossip, jerking each other this way and that, punching each other here and there, with
an amicable roughness consequent on their having, been boys together. Intimacy had reigned of old between the little
Sherringhams and the little Dormers, united in the country by ease of neighbouring and by the fact that there was first
cousinship, not neglected, among the parents, Lady Agnes standing in this plastic relation to Lady Windrush, the mother
of Peter and Julia as well as of other daughters and of a maturer youth who was to inherit, and who since then had
inherited, the ancient barony. Many things had altered later on, but not the good reasons for not explaining. One of
our young men had gone to Eton and the other to Harrow — the scattered school on the hill was the tradition of the
Dormers — and the divergence had rather taken its course in university years. Bricket, however, had remained accessible
to Windrush, and Windrush to Bricket, to which estate Percival Dormer had now succeeded, terminating the interchange a
trifle rudely by letting out that pleasant white house in the midlands — its expropriated inhabitants, Lady Agnes and
her daughters, adored it — to an American reputed rich, who in the first flush of his sense of contrasts considered
that for twelve hundred a year he got it at a bargain. Bricket had come to the late Sir Nicholas from his elder
brother, dying wifeless and childless. The new baronet, so different from his father — though recalling at some points
the uncle after whom he had been named — that Nick had to make it up by cultivating conformity, roamed about the world,
taking shots which excited the enthusiasm of society, when society heard of them, at the few legitimate creatures of
the chase the British rifle had up to that time spared. Lady Agnes meanwhile settled with her girls in a gabled,
latticed house in a mentionable quarter, though it still required a little explaining, of the temperate zone of London.
It was not into her lap, poor woman, that the revenues of Bricket were poured. There was no dower-house attached to
that moderate property, and the allowance with which the estate was charged on her ladyship’s behalf was not an
incitement to grandeur.

Nick had a room under his mother’s roof, which he mainly used to dress for dinner when dining in Calcutta Gardens,
and he had “kept on” his chambers in the Temple; for to a young man in public life an independent address was
indispensable. Moreover, he was suspected of having a studio in an out-of-the-way district, the indistinguishable parts
of South Kensington, incongruous as such a retreat might seem in the case of a member of Parliament. It was an absurd
place to see his constituents unless he wanted to paint their portraits, a kind of “representation” with which they
would scarce have been satisfied; and in fact the only question of portraiture had been when the wives and daughters of
several of them expressed a wish for the picture of their handsome young member. Nick had not offered to paint it
himself, and the studio was taken for granted rather than much looked into by the ladies in Calcutta Gardens. Too
express a disposition to regard whims of this sort as extravagance pure and simple was known by them to be open to
correction; for they were not oblivious that Mr. Carteret had humours which weighed against them in the shape of
convenient cheques nestling between the inside pages of legible letters of advice. Mr. Carteret was Nick’s providence,
just as Nick was looked to, in a general way, to be that of his mother and sisters, especially since it had become so
plain that Percy, who was not subtly selfish, would operate, mainly with a “six-bore,” quite out of that sphere. It was
not for studios certainly that Mr. Carteret sent cheques; but they were an expression of general confidence in Nick,
and a little expansion was natural to a young man enjoying such a luxury as that. It was sufficiently felt in Calcutta
Gardens that he could be looked to not to betray such confidence; for Mr. Carteret’s behaviour could have no name at
all unless one were prepared to call it encouraging. He had never promised anything, but he was one of the delightful
persons with whom the redemption precedes or dispenses with the vow. He had been an early and lifelong friend of the
late right honourable gentleman, a political follower, a devoted admirer, a stanch supporter in difficult hours. He had
never married, espousing nothing more reproductive than Sir Nicholas’s views — he used to write letters to the
Times in favour of them — and had, so far as was known, neither chick nor child; nothing but an amiable little
family of eccentricities, the flower of which was his odd taste for living in a small, steep, clean country town, all
green gardens and red walls with a girdle of hedge-rows, all clustered about an immense brown old abbey. When Lady
Agnes’s imagination rested upon the future of her second son she liked to remember that Mr. Carteret had nothing to
“keep up”: the inference seemed so direct that he would keep up Nick.

The most important event in the life of this young man had been incomparably his success, under his father’s eyes,
more than two years before, in the sharp contest for Crockhurst — a victory which his consecrated name, his extreme
youth, his ardour in the fray, the marked personal sympathy of the party, and the attention excited by the fresh
cleverness of his speeches, tinted with young idealism and yet sticking sufficiently to the question — the burning
question which has since burned out — had made quite splendid. There had been leaders in the newspapers about it, half
in compliment to her husband, who was known to be failing so prematurely — he was almost as young to die, and to die
famous, for Lady Agnes regarded it as famous, as his son had been to stand — tributes the boy’s mother religiously
preserved, cut out and tied together with a ribbon, in the innermost drawer of a favourite cabinet. But it had been a
barren, or almost a barren triumph, for in the order of importance in Nick’s history another incident had run it, as
the phrase is, very close: nothing less than the quick dissolution of the Parliament in which he was so manifestly
destined to give symptoms of a future. He had not recovered his seat at the general election, for the second contest
was even sharper than the first and the Tories had put forward a loud, vulgar, rattling, bullying, money-spending man.
It was to a certain extent a comfort that poor Sir Nicholas, who had been witness of the bright hour, should have
passed away before the darkness. He died with all his hopes on his second son’s head, unconscious of near
disappointment, handing on the torch and the tradition, after a long, supreme interview with Nick at which Lady Agnes
had not been present, but which she knew to have been a thorough paternal dedication, an august communication of ideas
on the highest national questions (she had reason to believe he had touched on those of external as well as of domestic
and of colonial policy) leaving on the boy’s nature and manner from that moment the most unmistakable traces. If his
tendency to reverie increased it was because he had so much to think over in what his pale father had said to him in
the hushed dim chamber, laying on him the great mission that death had cut short, breathing into him with unforgettable
solemnity the very accents — Sir Nicholas’s voice had been wonderful for richness — that he was to sound again. It was
work cut out for a lifetime, and that “coordinating power in relation to detail” which was one of the great
characteristics of the lamented statesman’s high distinction — the most analytic of the weekly papers was always
talking about it — had enabled him to rescue the prospect from any shade of vagueness or of ambiguity.

Five years before Nick Dormer went up to be questioned by the electors of Crockhurst Peter Sherringham had appeared
before a board of examiners who let him off much less easily, though there were also some flattering prejudices in his
favour; such influences being a part of the copious, light, unembarrassing baggage with which each of the young men
began life. Peter passed, however, passed high, and had his reward in prompt assignment to small, subordinate,
diplomatic duties in Germany. Since then he had had his professional adventures, which need not arrest us, inasmuch as
they had all paled in the light of his appointment, nearly three years previous to the moment of our making his
acquaintance, to a secretaryship of embassy in Paris. He had done well and had gone fast and for the present could draw
his breath at ease. It pleased him better to remain in Paris as a subordinate than to go to Honduras as a principal,
and Nick Dormer had not put a false colour on the matter in speaking of his stall at the Théâtre Français as a sedative
to his ambition. Nick’s inferiority in age to his cousin sat on him more lightly than when they had been in their
teens; and indeed no one can very well be much older than a young man who has figured for a year, however
imperceptibly, in the House of Commons. Separation and diversity had made them reciprocally strange enough to give a
price to what they shared; they were friends without being particular friends; that further degree could always hang
before them as a suitable but not oppressive contingency, and they were both conscious that it was in their interest to
keep certain differences to “chaff” each other about — so possible was it that they might have quarrelled if they had
had everything in common. Peter, as being wide-minded, was a little irritated to find his cousin always so intensely
British, while Nick Dormer made him the object of the same compassionate criticism, recognised in him a rare knack with
foreign tongues, but reflected, and even with extravagance declared, that it was a pity to have gone so far from home
only to remain so homely. Moreover, Nick had his ideas about the diplomatic mind, finding in it, for his own sympathy,
always the wrong turn. Dry, narrow, barren, poor he pronounced it in familiar conversation with the clever secretary;
wanting in imagination, in generosity, in the finest perceptions and the highest courage. This served as well as
anything else to keep the peace between them; it was a necessity of their friendly intercourse that they should scuffle
a little, and it scarcely mattered what they scuffled about. Nick Dormer’s express enjoyment of Paris, the shop-windows
on the quays, the old books on the parapet, the gaiety of the river, the grandeur of the Louvre, every fine feature of
that prodigious face, struck his companion as a sign of insularity; the appreciation of such things having become with
Sherringham an unconscious habit, a contented assimilation. If poor Nick, for the hour, was demonstrative and lyrical,
it was because he had no other way of sounding the note of farewell to the independent life of which the term seemed
now definitely in sight — the sense so pressed upon him that these were the last moments of his freedom. He would waste
time till half-past seven, because half-past seven meant dinner, and dinner meant his mother solemnly attended by the
strenuous shade of his father and re-enforced by Julia.